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Once again, things are going to the dogs at World Stage, but artistic director Tina Rasmussen wouldn’t have it any other way.

The edgy global festival of theatre and dance had one of its biggest hits last year with Dachshund UN, in which a troupe of sausage dogs had their way with the world political scene.

This year’s pop favourite may very well be another smaller canine-based show, Major Tom, which will play the Enwave Theatre from Feb. 26 through March 1, 2014.

British performance artist Victoria Melody entered her six-year-old basset hound, Major Tom, into a competition and was so stung by the callous way he was judged she felt she should share the experience and went out on the beauty pageant circuit. Major Tom is the hilarious but often rueful story of how we allow ourselves to be judged, all in the hope of acceptance.

Another major work is likely to be Mies Julie, the South African version of Strindberg’s abrasive classic about class and sexual politics in the liaison of an aristocratic woman and her male servant. Hailed as brilliant by critics at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, this presentation is likely to scorch the Enwave Theatre from May 6 to 10.

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The hat trick of theatre devoted to themes of gender equality will arrive at the Fleck Dance Theatre from Feb. 12 to 15, when Young Jean Lee’s company returns to World Stage with Untitled Feminist Show, having scored a major succès de scandale in 2012 with The Shipment.

This latest work is a play almost without words and totally without clothes as six performers use a variety of means to tell significant stories without conventional gender signifiers, all to a rock-driven soundtrack.

A work closer to home shares the Enwave Theatre and the Natrel Pond from May 15 to18, when the award-winning Toronto collective UnSpun Theatre presents The Speedy. This is the true story of the HMS Speedy, a schooner that sank in Lake Ontario more than 200 years ago in a strange mixture of murder and magic.

The final theatrical event will be a celebration of the 40th anniversary of World Stage’s home, Harbourfront Centre, conducted by media company Fixt Point, led by artists Lisa Marie DiLiberto and Charles Ketchabaw.

In their original piece, The Tale of Harbourfront Centre, they will try to capture the myriad experiences that people have had there over the four decades and deliver them as a radio play, available for download as of April 1.

They include Kyle Abraham’s The Radio Show, at the Fleck Dance Theatre from Feb. 5 to 8; Denise Fujiwara’s Eunoia, at the Enwave Theatre from March 19 to 22; Conte d’amour by artists from Sweden, Finland and Germany, which plays the Fleck Dance Theatre on April 1 to 2 and 4 to 5; and last, but definitely not least, Dave St-Pierre concludes his powerful dance trilogy on love and death with Foudres, from April 29 to May 3 at Fleck Dance Theatre, a piece which celebrates “the ugliness and beauty of humanity.”

Not a bad slogan for all of World Stage, 2014.

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